Purgatory in a Bottle
by element78
Summary: Welcome to Rudy's Roadside Grill, where time has no meaning and remembering your own name is a death sentence.
1. Chapter 1

A/N: Been sick recently, sick and dreary and yucky. When I get like this, I watch movies endlessly, for lack of anything better to do. Last time, it was the Lord of the Rings trilogy four times in a row. This time, I've been power-watching Supernatural. For this, I got really, _really_ weird dreams, inspiration for a Cas-centric fic that will not cooperate, and… this. This is a weird, curious little one-shot, which I chopped into three chapters for manageability.

For those of you who reach the end of this chapter and go, _what the hell?_, well, that was pretty much the point. It will all make sense soon, I promise.

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><p><em>shift<em>

"- and expect heavy showers on Thursday. Now we go over to Johnny Rattecks for sports. Johnny?"

Eyes half-closed, gaze blank, blink at the distant noise. A body sitting bolt upright sways, a bit, like a sapling in a breeze.

"Thanks, Frank. Now, we had quite the shock in baseball today. The KC Royals finally broke their stalemate with the Yankees and emerged the victors with a surprise home run..."

The noise continues on, shot through with static and just loud enough to hear. There's something wrong, with the words, with the voice itself, but the brain just can't engage. The darkness beckons and the eyes slide almost completely shut, all light blocked out save a faint smudge. The noise is going, too, and the body couldn't move of its own volition, even if jabbed by a cattle prod, and it's just too much effort-

_DING!_

He jumps, heart hammering, and it all comes snapping back into place with a Doppler echo. He twists in his seat to track the noise.

"Order up!" an old woman calls out in a crow's voice, and the _ding _comes again. He turns the other way and finds her behind the chest-high counter, spatula in one hand. She sees him, and scowls, and whacks the countertop bell with her spatula for the third time.

"This is self-service, buster," she tells him. "You wanna eat, come and get it."

He blinks at her- a little old woman with a face like a crumpled brown paper bag and candy-red hair tamed into severe curls by enough hair spray to hold it in place until the year 2020- and she bashes the bell again. Every muscle contracts at the noise, so jarring and bright in this dusty, sleepy world.

"Please stop that," he says, his voice smooth and refined compared to hers. Her scowl deepens.

"What, you English?" she asks disdainfully, and he pauses. When he doesn't answer, she assumes what appears to be the worse and rolls her eyes. "Figures."

The truth of it is foggy, in his mind- some part of him knows the word, is shouting it. 'English' is wrong, he knows, but he just can't seem to connect with the part of his brain that knows the right word.

"Well, Your Majesty, we don't got no tea and crumpets. You get what you get and you'll take it and that's that." She waves her spatula at him, then turns and heads back into the bright-lit room beyond. He blinks again, trying to puzzle out what that was supposed to mean.

_shift_

"I wouldn't worry about her," the man says as he sets the plate down on the table and slides it over. "She probably remembers the American Revolution." He sits down in the booth across the table and leans forward a bit, smiling a harmless charming smile. His eyes are very blue.

"What is this?" he asks, looking at the plate in front of him, and the stranger shrugs.

"Hamburger and chips," he says, snaking a hand out to steal one of the latter. "Or fries, as the case may be. When in Rome."

An unappetizing, congealing pile of grease is what it is, no matter what city they're in. "And I have to eat it?"

"Can't hurt," the stranger says. "Probably won't make a difference."

Those eyes are locked on his left shoulder. He looks over to find his clothes- what was once a nice suit- shredded and bloody in the hollow between collarbone and shoulder. The skin underneath is intact and unmarked.

"Where am I?" he finally asks, since this man is the friendlier of the two people he's encountered so far. Another chip- fry- is stolen as the stranger gives this a moment of thought.

"What do you remember?" he counters.

"About what?"

"Anything." Those blue eyes lock on his and he can't break contact, can barely breathe for the intensity. "Everything."

_There will be rain on Thursday, and Johnny Rattecks does the sports_, he wants to say. This is not the right answer, he knows, but it's as far back as it goes. He should be panicking over this. Instead he takes a sip of water from the glass the stranger had brought over.

He shakes his head a bit. "Sorry."

"Nothing? Not even me?" The teasing tone is forced. It sounds wrong.

"Who are you?" he asks.

The stranger's eyes darken, with pain, with concern, then with anger, which takes over quickly and shuts out everything else. He pushes the mostly untouched plate of food aside and leans closer.

"All right," he says, quiet and urgent. "Two things you have to do. One is not talk about me, to anyone. They can't know I'm here."

"What happens if they find out?" he asks.

"I don't know," the stranger admits. "Nothing good, I can promise you that." Once again those eyes shift to his shoulder, to the injuries he doesn't have, and the implication is clear enough.

"And the other thing?" he prompts, because the crow could return at any second. A hand wraps around his wrist and holds on tight, tight enough to bruise.

Which, he realizes later, is the point. A physical reminder, should all else fail.

"Remember," he says. "It doesn't matter how, just remember. Everything and anything. Everything you can."

He looks as if he's going to say something else, but there's a sudden loud clattering from the room beyond the counter, presumably the kitchen. They both look over, hearing the crow cursing, and she appears briefly

_shift_

The plate is sitting on the table in front of him. It's been picked at, and he can feel a corresponding rolling in his gut. He'd eaten too much of this slop.

A young man, head shaved bare and ears gaged with holes large enough for a tin can, comes out of the back room. He's wearing an apron that was once white and carrying a wet dishcloth and a plastic tub. The plate and water glass go in the tub, the table gets a perfunctory wipe with the cloth.

He takes stock, finally, as the boy works.

It's a roadside diner straight out of Americana. There are a dozen or so booths, cracked vinyl that might have once been red, and twice as many tables with wobbly-looking chairs. There's the normal kitsch on the walls, random pictures and ugly paintings and movie posters and a framed white sports jersey, number 58, complete with grass stains. The counter dominates the far wall, the kitchen beyond. Above it is a sign that says Rudy's Roadside Grill. Tucked away in the right corner of the back wall is the swinging door the boy had come through. A rectangular sticker, slightly crooked, pronounces the bathrooms to be through that door.

A television is on a shelf in the corner behind him, which is why he can hear but not see it. He turns to look and finds the local news has given way to Jeopardy

_shift_

He finds a marker at the cash register, a fat black specimen, and goes over to the framed jersey. It comes off the wall easily enough, and as he expects, the wall behind is the same unappealing orangey red as the rest of the diner. This patch is cleaner, however, with none of the grunge and grime that forms a solid layer of grey over everything that doesn't move in here.

There is no front door, he has long since noticed. And the wide windows along the front wall, all of which show grey skies and a barren stretch of road with a tumbleweed or two, look like they're painted on the walls.

REMEMBER

he writes on the wall, at the top of the clean spot. There he stops, and realizes his earliest memories have already gone fuzzy. Which is impossible, since he'd only woken up here a few- a little-

_Rain on Thursday_, he writes. It takes a moment's thought to remember which day.

_Sports with Johnny_ is next. He can't remember the last name, or the names of the teams Johnny had been talking about. _Baseball. Surprise win, home run._

_Crow. No tea and crumpets, Your Majesty._

_Hamburger and ch- fries._

_Boy with apron and big ears._

_Jeopardy. Final question, invention of stainless steel._

Here he pauses. He can't lose the memory of those keen eyes, but he doesn't dare write anything about them on the wall for all and sundry to see. Instead, after a moment's consideration, he takes off his jacket and pushes his shirt sleeve up. On his left forearm, just before the wrist, he writes _blue eyes_. He gives the marker ink a moment to dry, then puts his jacket back on. It doesn't quite cover the words completely, but it's close enough.

"She's not gonna like that," the boy says, when he comes out a bit later and sees the wall.

He hangs the jersey up over it and looks back at the boy, who shrugs and goes about wiping down the seats of the booths

_shift_

"You really need to stop doing that."

"Doing what?" he asks, leaning against the swinging door. It opens in as well as out, but either way it will give them warning that someone's coming.

"Losing time," the stranger says. "You haven't noticed?" Eyebrows high, chin tucked against his chest. He looks like a little boy, and yet somehow ageless.

"Time is… weird, here," he admits. Everything is weird here. "But I know what you mean. Everything is running together. There's never a moment where nothing is happening."

"Like you're skipping the boring bits," the stranger agrees.

"How do I stop that?" he asks, and the stranger shrugs.

"Focus on the moment," he offers. "Do something to keep yourself grounded right here, right now. If it seems like it's going to, you know…" Here he makes an entirely useless hand gesture.

"Skip?" he tries, because there's no better word. The stranger nods slightly, shifts his weight and folds his arms across his chest.

"Do anything. Count your heartbeat. Walk laps around the room. Just don't let yourself keep skipping."

He's long past the point of needing to ask _what if._ He nods instead, looking over the diner.

A hand catches his, pulls his arm up and gently pushes his sleeve back. He watches as blue eyes focus on the words written on his wrist, then flick up to his face, one brow raised questioningly.

"You said I shouldn't tell the others about you," he explains, a bit sheepish and annoyed at himself for it. "I assumed that meant writing about you on the wall wasn't allowed."

The stranger sweeps his gaze around the room quickly, then back to him. The questioning look hasn't budged.

He tugs his hand free, moves over to the jersey and pushes it aside. The stranger studies the list, smiling softly.

"And they were worried," he says, almost a whisper.

"Who?" he asks, and the question is waved off. It's not surprising- no names, he'd picked up on that pattern right off.

The stranger beckons him back over to the swinging door, and he goes without thought.

"You're not going to forget about me," the stranger tells him. "Not again. I won't let it happen."

And because he said so, it is fact. He doesn't seem the compromising sort.

"Who are these people?" he asks, tentative, not sure how to respond to that. The stranger's blue eyes skip to the door and he sighs.

"Nobody, yet," he says. "An opportunity. A placeholder." He shrugs. "An open doorway."

There's a menace in his words, a deep and abiding danger. He cannot help, those words say. If whatever is on the other side comes through those doorways, he can do nothing.

_shift_


	2. Chapter 2

A/N: This may or may not evolve into four chapters instead of just three, since I redid the last chapter and it runneth over. This chapter is shorter than I like, but I liked where it ended better than anywhere else.

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><p><em>shift<em>

The windows are actually windows, he finds. The glass is cool and smooth under his fingers, but solid. He goes from tapping against it to throwing one of the chairs at it, and nothing happens.

_Doorways_ goes on the list.

_Stop skipping_ is next.

Time is not moving, he thinks. Time has no influence here at all. It feels like seconds ago the crow jerked him out of whatever reverie he'd been in- seconds ago, when it doesn't feel like years. There are no clocks here, not even a junked old clock that no longer works and has been hung on the wall as decoration. The light outside is a uniform grey, and doesn't appear to be changing at all.

He heads through the swinging doors. One short hallway leads to the restrooms on the right. To the left is the kitchen, dead ahead is something like a break room. He heads right.

The lights in the restroom flicker badly. He leaves the door propped open enough to let in a thick sliver of light, just in case. He doesn't actually need to use the restroom, and so simply looks around, exploring and engaging- _stop skipping_- and it takes a pathetically long moment for him to even realize something is wrong, never mind what.

There are no mirrors.

The windows in the main room don't reflect, either, not from any angle. He considers this, arms wrapped around him.

"Hey," the boy says, from behind the counter. "You want some dinner?"

"I haven't paid for lunch," he answers, and the boy frowns.

"Yeah, no, don't worry about it," the boy says. He leans forward, as if what he has to say next is by some means a secret. "The old bird, she's a terrible cook. We can't charge ya for this."

He doesn't know how to act around these two. Something is very obviously wrong. Is he supposed to be panicking? Demanding information? Or is his lucidity rare, and putting on such a show would be suspicious?

"All right," he says, and moves away from the window

_shift_

and into pain.

Liquid fire runs through his veins, his left shoulder is pure agony, and his chest aches. He struggles for a long moment and finally drags in a breath, lets it out again in a long rush.

He senses movement above him and his eyes snap open. If anything, it's darker that way. His left arm refuses to move- probably for the best- but his right is perfectly mobile, and he reaches up, trailing fingers through shadows.

Something as cold and dry and rough as old bone seizes his wrist, holds on even when he reflexively jerks back. He lashes out with a foot and hits nothing.

And then something else touches his shoulder- his left shoulder, and he remembers the damage he had seen done to his suit in that other place, and realizes that here he has the injuries to match- and he screams. Tries to scream. His voice, so cultured in that other place, is a ruin here, throat raw and ragged.

Something shrieks, starting off high pitched and scaling right up into supersonic. He cringes away from the noise, rolling onto his right side. There's movement again, and the screeching stops, and then there's light, blue as the summer sky

_shift_

He rockets to his feet, sending the table he was sitting at skidding across the room, and scrambles backwards. The chair tilts instead of sliding aside and he goes down, tangled in its legs.

"Hey, calm down!" a voice orders, but calm is well and truly beyond him. He fights free of the chair and scuttles backwards, slamming his shoulders into another table. The owner of that voice- the blue-eyed stranger- lunges forward and catches it before it can topple over and he rolls away.

"Please, Ia-" the stranger catches himself, jaw snapping shut tight. After a moment he tries again. "Look, you need to stay calm."

"What was that?" he demands, words snagging on phantom pain in his throat. He can feel an echo of the fiery roughness from the other place. His left shoulder is stiff, and the diner's lights are too bright to eyes adjusted to a darker place. "What is going on here? Why won't you _tell me_?"

"Because I can't!" the stranger yells back, then whirls around suddenly. The crow comes around the corner behind the counter, and her eyes go wide

_shift_

back into the world of pain and it hasn't improved much. He hurts too much to do anything save wince at the transition. Over his head, the shrieking starts to sound almost like intelligent speech, grating over human ears like fingernails on a chalkboard and he concentrates on breathing, tasting blood on the back of his tongue and wondering if this is hell

_shift_

"- and expect heavy showers on Thursday. Now we go over to Johnny Rattecks for sports. Johnny?"

"Thanks, Frank. Now, we had quite the shock in baseball today. The KC Royals finally broke their stalemate with the Yankees and emerged the victors with a surprise home run..."

He blinks, opens his eyes. Back at Rudy's Roadside Diner.

_DING!_

"Order up," the crow calls, and he slides out of the booth immediately. She grunts at him in satisfaction and retreats into the kitchen.

He takes the plate and dumps it on the nearest table, takes the countertop bell and throws it against the far wall as hard as he can. Then he strides to the swinging door and pushes in. He turns left, gets two steps towards the kitchen, fully intending to stumble on a plan somewhere along the way. Then a strong hand catches his arm and hauls him backward, into the bathroom with the questionable light.

Then the door slams and the light is no longer questionable, but just plain gone.

He pushes away from the stranger and stumbles in the pitch black, finds a wall by accident and parks himself there.

"Feeling better?" the stranger asks, and his voice is a lifeline in the dark. He takes a deep breath, tells himself there's nothing in this room except himself and a man whom, for reasons he can't explain, he trusts with his life.

"What happened?" he asks, when he's settled. "It's like it started over."

"Yeah, we reset the system," the stranger says apologetically. "Had to catch it before it reported an intruder."

"Reset the system," he echoes. "This is- I'm in a computer?"

"Kind of," the stranger says in a _not really_ sort of way. "We can't do that again," he adds.

He thinks this over for a long moment, staring into the protective darkness. It's easier, he decides, when they can't see each other's face, when they have only the voice to work with.

"What can you tell me? About all of this?"

The stranger takes a deep breath, shifts a little bit with a rustle of clothing.

"I can't," he says. "Not now. I only have a limited time before I have to leave. Just- that marker you had, earlier. Where is it?"

It takes a moment of fumbling to find the door. He narrows his eyes against the light in the hallway, pauses for a moment and listens for the other two and hears them talking in the back room.

The marker is back by the register. His list on the wall is gone, but the words 'blue eyes' are still on his left wrist.

He stays by the door, back in the restroom, leaving it propped open just enough to see. The stranger takes the marker and pulls him into the room proper, letting the door click shut. Deft hands remove his jacket with far too much practice, push up his right sleeve, and he turns blindly towards the sensation of the marker on the fragile skin of his inner elbow.

"What…?" he begins.

"It's too complicated to explain right now," the stranger says, "but the short version is, memory is power here. The more you remember, the harder it is for them to control."

The pressure from the marker vanishes. His sleeve is tugged back down.

"Which is why you won't tell me anything," he says, as the stranger helps him slip his arms back into his jacket. The man is suspiciously familiar with helping people remove their clothes in the dark, he thinks, and wonders exactly what their relationship outside this bizarre place entailed.

"You need to remember enough to give them some trouble, something to focus on," the stranger says. "But not enough that you're not worth the effort and they just kill you instead. This," and he taps a finger on the writing on his inner arm, "is a failsafe. Use it only if you have no other choice. Once you do, you'll be out of here, for good."

"And back into a world where I'm dying," he murmurs. The stranger hesitates a long moment before answering, voice leaden with some heavy unidentified emotion.

"You're dying here, too. You just can't feel it."

He takes the marker and pushes the door open, as if to walk out. He pauses, turns back at the last instant. He thinks he already knows the answer to this question, but he asks anyway.

"What is it?" he asks, gesturing to the new graffiti

The bar of light slices across the stranger, highlighting half his face and leaving the other half in shadow. His expression is impossible to read.

"Your name."

_shift_


End file.
